Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World

[This is part 3 of my journey into triathlon over the last 2 years. You can read the first two parts here: Triathlons: A story in gradual change and Triathlons: Persevering in Gradual Change] Several months ago, after completing an olympic length triathlon, I signed up for a Half Ironman length triathlon (1.2mi…

This is a continuation of a post I published a year ago called : Triathlons: A story in gradual change After a restless nights sleep, I woke at 4:30 in the morning, ate a quick PB&J sandwich with a banana, and threw on some ridiculous looking compression shorts and a bike…

When it rains, it pours. When we have a lot of something, we tend value it less, especially any more quantities. If we are hungry and all we have is one orange, it’s pretty valuable. The second orange is still valuable but less so. The hundredth orange doesn’t have much…

Recently, I had an email exchange with a good friend at work. He posed a question and a couple of us chipped in with what we thought might be helpful information. He mostly ignored our response and repeated the content of his original email as though we either didn’t read…

Recently, they’ve discovered that heading soccer balls frequently can create an increased risk of concussion. Obviously, using your head for a soccer ball once doesn’t cause much damage, but doing so repeatedly in a short period can. We may respond to this by deciding we will never ever hit the…

Shortly after college, I had a passing interest learning chess and I used to watch videos of chess games with commentary by Josh Waitzkin. At a young age, Josh played at a very high level and the expectation at the time was that he would go on to be the…

Sometime ago, my manager asked me to put together a plan to validate a very complex system of software, so I requested a specification from the development team. After all, what was I supposed to test unless there was some document of what the system was required to do? But…

We started with good intentions, we were going to start studying early, slowly, and make sure that we really knew the material before the final. But here we are, the final is two days away and we still need to read through the last half of the text-book. So like…

Years ago, just before moving to India for a few months, my parents gave us a travel book on India. It was chock-full of beautiful pictures of what might be the most colorful country on the planet. When we got there we discovered the same beauty illustrated by the book,…

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to serve as a project leader over some of my peers. Shortly thereafter, one of them, an extremely talented engineer, and I both got promotions. As his project leader, I attended the manager’s meeting to give him his promotion and then I…